Bob Clark’s film Black Christmas (1974) is one of the earliest masterpieces of the slasher genre. It’s a film whose legacy and influence is indisputable. Not only did Black Christmas spawn many of the archetypes associated with slasher films, but it set a high standard for visual ingenuity in conveying the ominous threat of a psychotic killer hiding in a sorority house.
Olivia Hussey, Margot Kidder, Andrea Martin and Lynne Griffin are the sorority girls being stalked by the mad killer. Unlike so many films that followed Black Christmas these girls exist beyond narrative necessity. Margot Kidder in particular imbues her character Barb with so much busy work that one feels that she must exist in the world even when she isn’t on screen. Bob Clark is more than content to slow the pace of Black Christmas so that the audience has a few moments here and there to just live with these girls; to glimpse their lives beyond the threat of murder which looms over them.
Clark keeps everything taut with suspense, balancing the sorority house narrative along with a sub-plot involving a child murder which may or may not be linked. This subplot helps fill the atmosphere with more menace but also enables certain characters to cross over into the main narrative to provide either levity or an increased sense of danger. The Keir Dullea character performs a similar function as the red herring that will keep the viewer on the edge of the seat.
But the real feat that makes Black Christmas so affecting is achieved by cinematographer Reginald H. Morris. Morris and director Bob Clark painstakingly light their shots to recreate the aesthetic of Kodak Christmas advertisements. Black Christmas evokes the “look” of Christmas as it lives in the popular imagination more splendidly than in Clark’s own A Christmas Story (1983). When these images that could easily be captioned with words like “holiday”,”cheer”, “friends”, etc. give way to violent spectacles of murder and mutilation the effect is as subversive as it is disturbing.
Black Christmas is never pulpy or campy in the extreme. The tone of the film is actually pretty sombre for a slasher picture. The overall design of Black Christmas owes as much to Hitchcock as it does to giallo while never feeling like an exercise in intertextuality. There are so many unique images in Black Christmas, but none as memorable as the image of Lynne Griffin smothered and sitting by the window.
